So ... day two ... we're ready to put the "fixed" jet-ski back in the water ... and it does the same thing as before ... starts for thirty seconds and then won't start ... I think at this point if the lemon man was the crying sort, he would have been balling ... so, we get back on the phone with the rental people ... and this time he goes alone back to Ogallala to get the jet-ski looked at again ... and hopefully really fixed ...
I head back to camp where I'm left to deal with all six kids and try to entertain the other people there as well ... it wasn't really a chore to entertain people ... it was just hard ... and not at all the way it was supposed to go ...
The lemon man was gone for about six hours only to come back and tell us that the jet-ski wasn't fixable ... the cooling system was dead and the parts were going to take days to get there ... and we only had two days left of our vacation ...
That night was better ... filled with conversation and friends ... the two teenage girls were
happy that one of our friends brought along their teenage nephew ... although my post about self-entitled teenage girls is still coming ... because, while it's part of our vacation story, it's also a story in itself ...
The lemon man was very disappointed ... the main reason he wanted to go to the lake was to jet-ski and now we had towed a broken jet-ski all the way from home ... the rental company said they would refund all our money (which they did, and they gave us a credit for a free day in the future), but that didn't fix his need and desire to go jet-skiing then ...
One of the friends that came out there with us was going to rent a boat the next morning, but they were sold out of boats, so he ended up renting a jet-ski ... this totally made the lemon man's day ... the next day we decided to pull from savings and rent a second one, so the fourth day we had two jet-skis, we knew we would get the money back for the other one ... and while the one we rented out there was way more expensive per hour, it worked as a solution to a problem we wished we hadn't had ...
The kids had a blast on the jet-skis ... I learned how to drive one ... which scared the living daylights out of me at first ...The problem was that because we rented the jet-ski on our last day there ... and we felt like it was so expensive we had to get every single minute out of it ... the lemon man and I finished the day very, very sore ... you don't think that you're going to wind up hurting that much, but you use a ton of core muscles to keep that thing balanced ... and then when you do fly off of it ... you have to climb back on which uses even different muscles ...
We returned the jet-ski at 5pm ... and our plan was to pack up camp and make it back home (four to six hours away) that night ... we didn't even hit the Nebraska border before I called the lemon man and said there was no way we were going to make it ... we stopped at a hotel in Sterling, Colorado ... and it was basically a roach motel ... but we were so sore, so tired that it was a little slice of heaven ...
So, we spent five nights and four days away from home and really none of them were relaxing and peaceful and the way we had envisioned it going ... but there were definitely memories made ... my children will remember for a long time ... which was part of the point in going ... I just hope if we make it out there again in the future that we have a chance to really relax while we do it ...
